Comment by mofeien
1 day ago
It seems that every time an article is posted on HN about a lab leader calling for a coordinated Pause of AI development, a sizeable fraction of commenters are interpreting it as hype or admission of failure, often with high confidence that AI progress is slowing.
Is would be understandable for it to be wishful thinking and dissociation with reality facing the fact that our jobs and what many of us love doing is being automated and taken away, and our craft being made economically worthless.
But no one knows where the limit is. It was only one year ago that Claude code was starting to become useful and now it handles large code bases with a dexterity that is unseen in humans, where within each session it basically starts from a clean slate.
So instead of denying that this is actually happening right now, it would be much more productive to actually take sama and others at their word and push for global regulation, to force them to do as they say and slow down with this technology and proceed more judiciously.
LLMs are incredibly good at handling code. But you're extrapolating their capabilities just because their handling of code is so shockingly good (compared to what we had before).
I think AGI will be eventually achieved, but it will not come from an LLM, and it will not be anytime soon.
I'll worry when a more promising architecture comes online.
Why wouldn't being incredibly good at handling code and reaching the goals there extrapolate to other cognitive disciplines?
And it didn't even start with code, but just from being incredibly accurate and precise at predicting the next token. From that emerged being incredibly good at handling code, and being incredibly good at finding counterexamples for major open mathematical problems.
The thing that these agentic systems are getting incredibly good at is steering outcomes, that is to make the world behave in a way that fits their objective. We had that with the Go AI on a game board, now with code on a computer and with mathematics in an abstract world determined by axioms.
And then people just say "Ah, because sama said we should Pause this means that this is it, the bubble is popping". I wish there was a real, strong argument for why ASI will not be achieved by LLMs, and why it will never be able to steer outcomes in the real world. But so far the disciplines just keep falling as LLMs are scaled further, and there seems to be no limit in sight.
I guess we'll see, but odds are that reality will reel you back in.